KHULNA (Bangladesh) • The death toll from a cyclone that barrelled into the coasts of Bangladesh and India has risen to 24, the authorities said yesterday, as the two nations assessed the scale of devastation wreaked by the powerful storm.
Bangladesh carried out one of its biggest ever evacuations, moving some 2.1 million people to cyclone shelters specially built to minimise casualties from such storms which can claim thousands of victims.
Cyclone Bulbul, packing winds of up to 120kmh when it hit late last Saturday, killed 12 people in Bangladesh - 11 from falling trees - and 12 in India's West Bengal and Odisha states.
Five others remain missing after a fishing trawler sank in squally weather near Bangladesh's southern island of Bhola, district administrator Masud Alam Siddiqui told Agence France-Presse.
About 6,000 homes were partially or fully damaged. No major damage was reported in camps in south-eastern Bangladesh, home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.
A ship was to sail to St Martin's Island yesterday to rescue 1,200 mostly local tourists who have been stranded there for days, said Mr Saiful Islam, the chief executive of Teknaf sub-district.
Bangladesh's junior minister for disaster management Enamur Rahman said Bulbul left a trail of destruction, damaging some 10,000 mud, tin and bamboo homes and 200,000 ha of crops.
The cyclone weakened as it tracked inland.
The Sundarbans - the world's largest mangrove forest which straddles the two nations and is home to several endangered species - shielded the coast from the storm's full impact, officials added.
In India, nearly 120,000 evacuated people were returning home as the cyclone weakened, the authorities said. Coastal crops in India's Odisha state had been extensively damaged, officials told the Press Trust of India.
Bangladesh's low-lying coast, home to 30 million people, and India's eastern region are regularly hit by cyclones that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in recent decades.
The cyclone season in the Bay of Bengal can last from April to December. In 1999, a super-cyclone battered the coast of Odisha state for 30 hours, killing 10,000 people.
While the storms' frequency and intensity have increased - partly due to climate change - the death tolls have come down because of faster evacuations and the building of thousands of coastal shelters.
AGENCE-FRANCE PRESSE, REUTERS
